CCTV Traffic Management System For Reading Council

Tyco has provided an integrated command and control centre for enabling improved traffic management including bus lane enforcement and parking management in the UK town of Reading

Working alongside preferred partners, Tyco Integrated Systems have just completed various projects to provide a combined attended and unattended digital parking and traffic enforcement solution for Reading Borough Council (RBC). The solutions combine the benefits of using existing CCTV cameras to enforce bus lane and parking restrictions with the convenience and flexibility of wireless Lanewatch cameras to automatically enforce bus gates that are outside the range of the existing CCTV traffic cameras.

When Tyco first installed CCTV cameras as part of an analogue system for RBC some years ago they did so with the foresight of future modular upgrades; the beauty of Tyco’s Mosaic technology is not only its total efficiency but also its backward compatibility with legacy interfaces and its integration with third party products and systems.

Part of Tyco’s remit was updating the existing control room with new, more efficient equipment such as a video wall of 4 x 50” Barco LED DLP cubes, upgraded digital recording, a web capture interface with local police and the relocation of the associated server equipment which created significant further savings. Providing a migration from analogue to the Mosaic IP command and control system has proved extremely cost effective for RBC.

Marc Allen, UTMC ITS Systems Manager for RBC stated, “This has dramatically changed our operating procedures and improved the quality of information we are able to provide the public whilst also enhancing the working environment. The main benefit of the system was to enable the Traffic Management system to be as future proof as we could, especially with the emerging IP communication available today.”

Particularly impressive is the upgraded digital recording encoding from MPEG4 to H.264 which provides increased video quality whilst using reduced bandwidth and the ability to integrate a wide range of different camera transmission technologies like WiMAX, ADSL and BT; all being viewed and controlled via the Mosaic platform.